Wolf Whistle

by Marilyn Todd

  *

  As Claudia struggled back to consciousness, strange pictures formed and dissolved. A man with the head of a hawk. Another like a jackal. A woman in a blue dress with cow horns on her head—

  ‘Janus!’

  ‘It’s only the priestess,’ a deep voice said soothingly. ‘You’re in the Temple of Isis.’ He paused. ‘You passed out, I carried you here.’

  Isis? Memory crawled back, inch by inch. The Field of Mars. A path into the woods. The old voting hall. There was a fight…

  ‘Ssssh,’ the man said. ‘Easy, now.’

  A cool compress was pressed against her forehead and the lap in which her head lay smelled of musk. Close by, the woodpecker from hell drummed for all it was worth. It turned out to be Claudia’s teeth.

  ‘Is he dead?’ she asked, remembering everything now.

  Kaeso grinned. ‘Most emphatically.’

  He dipped his kerchief in the holy fountain and dabbed at the cuts and bruises on her face as images of Magic flashed through her head. The twin blades clutched between his fingers. The surprise upon his face. The professional assassination, with oh so little blood…

  Numbly, Claudia allowed Kaeso to ease her into a sitting position. Amber-coloured walls were painted floor to ceiling with regimented lines of birds and snakes and vibrant coloured figures. Hieroglyphics they were called, and the priestess with the cow horns threw heavy resins on the fire and gently rattled a sistrum before the goddess Isis, robed in dazzling white. Behind her, Osiris weighed a heart against a feather.

  ‘You followed me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply, and there was no need to ask why. The answer lay there, in his eyes.

  Claudia wanted to thank him for saving her life, but words were inadequate, payment obscene. So she cupped her hands and sipped the icy waters and told him instead about Sargon’s plans to sell the children into brothels.

  There was silence, while sharp features scanned the symbols on the walls. Cartouches, they were called. Or, holy names.

  ‘You know, I never once suspected that of Sargon,’ he said eventually, wrenching his gaze from a painted papyrus. ‘I thought he was my friend, yet he imagined I would track down frightened runaways and send them back to his gang of paedophiles.’ Kaeso shook his head in bewilderment. ‘How could he get involved in an enterprise as sordid as that?’

  ‘Money,’ she said simply. ‘He can never have enough, it runs through his fingers like this water in my hands.’

  The rattle of the sistrum ceased when the blue-gowned priestess disappeared through a door in the stonework.

  ‘Does Dino know?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Nor the Captain.’

  An acolyte emerged from the bowels of the temple, wearing a thick black wig and bangles. Smiling shyly, she began to dust the statue of hawk-faced Horus. Claudia waited until her egret feathers had moved on to Anubis.

  ‘One other matter I think you ought to know about. Arbil has given up the date liqueur.’ She watched the significance of her statement sink in.

  ‘I see.’ The only sign of anxiety was the pacing.

  ‘So you’d better get Angel out of Rome, and fast.’ Her eyes followed the slow, familiar lope.

  It could not have been Lugal who Angel hooked up with, the boy was too young, too one-dimensional for her tastes. She’d used the groom, led him on, and poor Lugal was too trusting to suspect he’d been tied up tighter than a goose for the oven. Angel wouldn’t care what befell him, either, once Arbil found out. Remember, this was the woman who affected concern for her husband, when in reality those checks were a necessary excuse to mark the progress of his blackouts and sow further seeds of doubt in his mind. The bruise on her cheek she had flaunted as a badge of Arbil’s deterioration—how she must have laughed, knowing it was the effect of her drugs which, by turns, rendered him impotent, put him to sleep and, when it suited her, made him violent. Claudia imagined that Arbil, when he uncovered her treachery, was unlikely to lean towards clemency.

  She recalled her very first meeting with Angel. The Indian had not been able to disguise her suspicion, which she masked with hostility, and in the end, that hostility had betrayed her. Otherwise Claudia would have thought nothing of oleanders and thorn apples and strong, date liqueur… Would not have made the connection between the hothouse lilies up at Arbil’s and the hothouse lilies in Kaeso’s bedroom—

  ‘At the start, it was exciting,’ he said. ‘An affair under Arbil’s nose.’

  Claudia could almost feel the intoxication that the plotting and the planning would induce. The illicit meetings, whispered messages. The knowledge that Arbil might find out any moment and exact his terrible revenge…

  Kaeso stopped pacing and ran his hands through his collar-length hair. In his belt was the knife he’d used to still Magic. ‘I didn’t know, until yesterday, that Angel meant Arbil harm.’

  ‘She meant to kill him, Kaeso.’ The bitch wanted him dead. It’s the only way she could get her hands on his money box.

  The junior priestess shook her egret feather duster out of doors and began to sweep the steps with a broom. The swishing of the heather twigs grew fainter stair by stair, and the heat inside the shrine intensified. Blood pounded through Claudia’s veins, throbbing at her pulse points and at the base of her ears.

  ‘Are you…in love with her?’

  ‘I was,’ he said slowly, turning to look Claudia full in the face.

  Her cheeks coloured, and the only sound was the trickle of the fountain. ‘What changed your mind?’ she asked.

  For several seconds, Kaeso simply held her gaze without blinking. ‘What changed my mind,’ he said huskily, ‘is that I met someone else.’

  A lump blocked her windpipe. There was no mistaking his meaning…

  Claudia kept her eyes clear of the powerful frame of the man tracker, the sleek war machine who had silenced her stalker for ever, as she pretended to re-arrange the folds of her gown. ‘Kaeso, I—’

  But he had gone.

  ‘Kaeso?’

  She was all alone in the temple. And when she asked the priestess which direction he had taken, the girl frowned. ‘No one came down these steps, but you, ma’am,’ she replied.

  Tight-lipped, Claudia smiled. To the end, Kaeso kept up his chicanery, and she knew she could return to that house on the Quirinal a hundred times and never find him.

  Not unless Kaeso wanted her to.

  XXXII

  His body beaded with sweat, his hair hanging limp in saturated ropes, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio made his way towards the steam room. The game of small ball, fast and physical, had exhausted him, but his mind was buzzing like a bee around a hyssop bush as he collapsed face down upon the table to submit to the ministrations of a Spaniard who’d clearly scraped kidskins for vellum in a previous incarnation.

  There were many aspects of these bizarre and grisly killings that worried him, he brooded, as the strigil scraped his flesh. Ritual murder’s always tricky, because despite the killer’s distinctive signature upon the crime, in most cases he’s virtually impossible to trace. But for once, Marcus had a fair old list of suspects.

  The Spaniard rolled him on to his back and proceeded to torture the remaining life out of his prostrate victim. True, he had eliminated those five suspects, but in the same way he’d overlooked the obvious regarding Zygia’s hair, somewhere along the line, Orbilio knew he had made a crucial mistake.

  His flesh raw, he tipped the Spaniard and let a square-jawed Sarmatian work warmed oils of chamomile and marjoram into his skin. Claudia had been positive Shannu could not pass his bars, now a chill descended on Marcus, despite the ministrations of the masseur. Suppose someone deliberately unbolted that door…

  Donning wood-soled sandals to protect his feet against the searing tiles, Orbilio clip-clopped into the hot room. ‘Ritual murder, ritual murder’ went the rhythm of the clogs, forcing him to recap the observances which the killer so assiduously followed.

  One:
lasso the victims, drag them backwards, knock them out. Two: strip them naked, tie their hands and then their feet, and he must gag them too, and remove the gag later, because no one had screamed. Then he started slashing, but why the twenty-seven cuts? What was the significance of the hair in the lap? And where did the whistle fit in? It all seemed so over the top. Almost an over-kill. Pinching his nose, Orbilio dived beneath the steaming waters. Of course! Bobbing up, he pushed the hair from off his face and grinned. It was the ritual which mattered, not the actual killing.

  As he shook off the drips, Severina’s face floated into his memory. Not how she’d looked in death, but how she looked in life. Beautiful, full of joy, with everything to live for. Why? he wondered. Why, of all the girls who bore a blue tattoo, should dark, vivacious Zygia be a target for the killer’s warped and twisted mind? What is it that sets the elfin Annia apart?

  Orbilio felt he was on the brink of more than just the plunge pool. He was—if only he dared follow up his instinct—poised on the brink of a terrible solution, because suppose (just suppose) he’d got this whole thing back to front? Arms outstretched, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio dived into the icy waters of the plunge pool.

  And shuddered.

  XXXIII

  ‘Claudia?’

  The bunch of keys jangled in his hand as Marcus let himself in, but only his voice came back to him, the echo undistorted by kitchen steam or by the clatters, bangs and jabber that denote a household’s heart.

  ‘I need to talk to you about Arbil.’

  Tossing the keys upon a vacant chopping block, he crossed the silent kitchen into an atrium where only marble eyes stared out and chatter came solely from the fountain. Where the hell was everybody?

  ‘Claudia,’ he bellowed, and ‘ya, ya, ya’ echoed back to him as he belted up the stairs. Her bedroom, and all the guest rooms, were deserted. Where the devil were the servants?

  ‘Like whether a goblet is half empty,’ he called out, as he checked the second gallery, ‘or half full—’

  Dare he barge into the bathroom? Nine days ago, she’d staunched his bleeding wounds and pressed sweet balms on to his bruises. You’d never know, from looking round, what had passed between them in this room.

  ‘—it’s a question of perspective.’

  Dammit, Claudia, I thought you’d be home. And then he remembered the musical farce. She must have taken the whole household as a treat.

  ‘This murder business,’ he said, more to keep himself company in this ringing hall of columns. ‘You talked of conjurors, remember? Seeing only what you’re deceived to see?’

  He may as well check the office before leaving.

  ‘Hell, we’ve been fed a stage set from the start.’

  ‘I know,’ Claudia said quietly. From her upright, hard-backed chair behind the desk, she swivelled her eyes to meet his, but her head didn’t move, and today he could forgive the lack of courtesy.

  On account of the knife which pressed against the artery in her neck.

  *

  Orbilio felt himself stumble. For the first time in his life, he knew what failure meant. Total, abject failure. He had seen death in all its forms, had killed in war and self-defence. There were occasions, he recalled, where men had died when they need not have, and he had been powerless to help. Partly that was why he joined the Security Police. To rectify those errors, and avenge.

  ‘Let her go,’ he said, edging through the doorway. ‘Untie her and take me instead.’

  A hand slid under Claudia’s chin and jerked it upwards, stretching her neck like a sacrificial beast’s. ‘Suppose I give Nemesis his rein and slit her throat, right here and now? What would you do then?’

  He watched, transfixed with horror, as the flat of the blade travelled slowly, almost sensuously, up and down, up and down Claudia’s throat.

  Orbilio heard the tremble in his voice. ‘I’d kill you.’ Claudia had closed her eyes, he noticed. Otherwise, there was no trace of fear upon her face. His gut turned over.

  ‘You might lock me away, like poor Shannu was locked away, an embarrassment to the family—’ the blade reverted to a point and pressed against the throbbing artery ‘—but my dear Marcus, you will never harm Penelope’s beloved baby.’

  Annia turned the full force of her beautiful, treacherous smile upon the man she called her cousin. ‘That I’m sure of.’

  XXXIV

  Marcus was right, Claudia thought. Annia had played him like a sucker from the start.

  Three murders so gruesome, so bizarre they would automatically attract the attention of the Security Police, though it was Marcus in particular she needed to hook, hence the encounter with Daphne. Heaven knows how long she’d been trailing the poor woman, waiting for the moment when her path would cross with Orbilio’s, but Annia—as ever—had played her part to perfection. There was no way, after hearing Penelope’s history, that he could remain on the sidelines.

  Not that he was the only mug. Claudia, too, had allowed logic and emotion to outweigh her natural instinct, and now she was about to pay the price. How strange, she thought. Despite Nemesis pressing at her throat, her mind drifted high above it, clear and calm. As though all this was happening to someone else and she was merely a spectator, watching from afar. Nothing seemed real. Not this warren of a house, unnaturally silenced. Not Marcus, unbuckling his sword belt with reluctance. And especially not sweet little Annia with her shiny, scrubbed face and glistening fair hair which she washed every day and tied back with a clean cerise ribbon. The same ribbon, incidentally, which bound Claudia’s wrists.

  ‘Take these.’ Annia tossed across a pair of handcuffs. ‘Back up slowly,’ she instructed Marcus. ‘Kneel beside that column, put your arms around it and clip on the manacles.’

  ‘Annia—’

  He advanced half a pace and Claudia felt a warm trickle run down her neck. The blade was so sharp, she hadn’t felt it puncture her skin.

  ‘All right, Annia.’ Marcus held up a placatory hand. ‘Anything you say.’

  His tone was conciliatory, yet even as he chained himself to the pillar, Claudia could see in his eyes that, by complying, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio had sealed his own death warrant.

  Like a shattered pot, the dream burst.

  Suddenly, the tiniest of details sprang to life. On the wall, Claudia could almost hear the leopard purring through its spots as Orpheus strummed his lyre. That tessellated peacock might strut off at any second, and Claudia could all but taste the ripened apricots and medlars drawn in paint. This is real, she thought. It’s not a dream, a play to be applauded. Her heart was thumping, her hands had turned to ice. The ivory inlays glinting in the sunlight, the aromatic herbs burning in the brazier, the monkey’s gouge marks in the satinwood and maple. They are real. As is Marcus. As is Annia.

  And so, goddammit, as am I!

  She bit deep into her lower lip to stop it trembling and for a moment, everything went dark and out of focus. Deep breaths, deep breaths. For gods’ sake, don’t pass out. Deep breaths. Her eye picked out a flax plant painted on the wall. Blue, like the peacock on the floor. Concentrate, concentrate. In Greece, whole hillsides would be covered in it. Atta girl, concentrate, concentrate. Think of how the stems are steeped to separate the fibres. Then bleached out in the sun before they can be woven into linen. That’s the stuff, well done. Once panic had subsided and cold beads of sweat ran hot again, Claudia could almost smile. As triumphs went, it might look small, but victory was relative.

  For Claudia, knowing that her mind was no longer held captive by Annia was akin to subduing Gaul.

  Not—she struggled with the bonds which tied her hands behind the chair—that it would necessarily be wise to let Annia in on the secret. Her sanity remained stable only so long as the Puppet Master’s stage was undisturbed. Ritual was all. She fed upon defencelessness and fear. Indeed, Claudia suspected that it was because Zygia had not crumpled that Annia lost her temper, and slit her throat in anger. How she must have despised that lack of self-contr
ol! She’d have blamed Zygia, of course. The girl provoked her, had it coming, she deserved to die like that, the bitch. But inside, her intemperance would have gnawed away. Next time, they would play by her rules—and thus had Severina come to grief, taunted to the end.

  Annia snatched the string of corals from around Claudia’s neck and began to assess their size and weight and value. She preferred the deeper red, herself, although other women swore by… Buttressed by her inner strength, Claudia blocked her out.

  What happened the day Zygia died? Did she really set out early, or had Severina covered up for, say, an illicit shopping spree or perhaps a long lie-in? Claudia imagined dark-haired Zygia pacing up and down the Cattle Market, stabbing her spiky curls with her fingers and wondering how best to make her approach to Annia. It was raining, but Zygia would not have noticed as she chewed her knuckle along the street beside the Circus. Claudia pictured her climbing the steep and slippery Cacian Steps, maybe pausing at the Lupercal to catch her breath. She would have approached the Temple of Apollo from the east, glad the library porticoes were deserted because the light was far too poor to read by. She would not have noticed droplets running down the marble columns, or dogs lapping water from the gutter. Wide-eyed and squeaky clean, Annia would have heard her out and doubts would have begun to form long before Annia spun some frilly tale to exonerate herself. ‘Come with me,’ she would have said. ‘I’ll prove it.’ And feeling foolish, Zygia would have backtracked down the Palatine with Annia, little knowing that this time when she approached the Lupercal, she would stare straight into Hell.

  During the time Claudia had been re-living Zygia’s nightmare, Annia had been tormenting Marcus the way a cat torments a mouse, pressing Nemesis flat to Claudia’s windpipe, or pointing the knife as though to slice her cheek, and emitting squeaks of satisfaction every time he flinched. But Claudia sensed a subtle change. Annia was preparing to move on.

  Time.

  Claudia needed to buy time—